Yesterday’s scandal simply left me gaping (bouche bée, actually). This can’t be… but it is. Lance Davis, one of the founders of the CentOS Linux project and owner of the domain centos.org, also director at UK Linux Ltd. and (presumably still) owner of Cheeplinux, is… Missing In Action… Absent Without Official Leave… unreachable, although suposedly not dead, nor seriously ill…

…and he’s holding the entirety of the donations that ever went to the CentOS project, if my understanding is correct. Gulp.

There is an Open Letter to Lance Davis posted on the front page of their site, on the mailing list, and on the developers’ personal blogs: one, two, three… generally you should find them on Planet CentOS.

The issue even got on Slashdot, and somebody updated the Wikipedia page on CentOS!

Dag added an interesting post on The burden of keeping things private, which is however weird, given that he personally resigned from the CentOS team one month ago.

Other reactions include: a thread on LinuxQuestions.org, a summary page on Mahalo, and probably a lot of opinions on personal blogs will follow.

The initial discussion on the mailing list has over 50 messages as I am writing this, not counting a split thread and a panic thread.

Very much unlike me, I have no personal stance on the matter. I have incidentally exchanged a couple of e-mails with Lance Davis a couple of years ago, but that was all: I don’t have an opinion on the guy.

I however suspect that, once Scientific Linux 5.4 released (hopefully with a nicer GDM theme), many, many new installations are going to be SL instead of CentOS. They have performed well lately, they’re the first to release a clone of EL 4.8, and also the first EL clone to rebuild Firefox 3.0.12.

Frankly, the way CentOS lags is not Lance’s fault.

UPDATE, AUG. 1: It looks like Lance Davis is going off the stage amiably…

Just a couple of them:

• Added the missing dependencies (otherwise, EPEL has them too) libsigc++20, glibmm24, gtkmm24, cairomm to fix GParted and Eiciel.
• Added soundconverter-sl for the users of Scientific Linux, who can’t install the regular soundconverter. It will pull gstreamer-plugins-extra (which has MP3 and tag support) instead of gstreamer-plugins-ugly (needed in EL and CentOS).

I definitely would like more success or failure reports from other users of EL5 clones…

UPDATE:

• Added gstreamer-plugins-ugly-sl-0.10.9 - THIS IS FOR SCIENTIFIC LINUX ONLY! SL uses a modified gstreamer-plugins-extras which conflicts with gstreamer-plugins-ugly (it should conflict with RPMforge’s and RPM Fusion’s too!) because they both include libgstlame. SL users need to install this package instead of the regular gstreamer-plugins-ugly.

The most suicidal of all is Yahoo’s decision to use Microsoft’s search engine! This is more than suicide, this is sheer idiocy! Bing sucks hugely, whereas Yahoo’s own search engine is reasonably good. UPDATE: Also on CNN money.

The second decision is less suicidal. In a clumsy attempt to become more appealing, Debian has decided to go for a time-based freeze, but not quite for a time-based release, as some people wrongly understood it! Releasing a new version 6 months after the freezing is not guaranteed. If it’s not guaranteed, then one still can’t do any planning with regards to Debian. But then…
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Cred că e ceva cu armenii ăştia, pe toţi îi apucă pofta de scris şi de cujetat. Vosganian, Pambuccian…

Pe 2 aprilie, Pambuccian făcea în Despre naturalitate în economie (I) o trecere în revistă vărzoasă a istoriei mecanismelor economiei mondiale, deşi omul este matematician, nu economist:
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§1. The flaw is by design, folks: the technological advances (and the moving of the production in countries with cheap labor and no rights for the employees) makes it necessary for the economic growth to be continuously accelerated, otherwise huge unemployment would happen. The problem is, the kind of economic growth the capitalist paradigm needs is definitely unsustainable…

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Din ciclul «să ne căcăm pe noi de râs cu traducerile Google în română», revin (episoade trecute: unu, doi) cu un text crăcănător, de pe blogul unei traducătoare: Concurenţa. De pus în ramă, nu alta! (Aş fi şi eu curios «cât timp de minute de la această viteză s-ar lua, şi cât de mult diesel, la uncie, ele ar fi plecat în rezervoare».)

Pe de altă parte, constat că Mircea Pricăjan s-a tâmpit. Cetiţi aicea în Străinul. Cică: «Luna trecută am intrat în cea de-a şaptea decadă a vieţii mele.» Deceniu, boule, deceniu! (Deşi povestirea este din 2002, poate între timp omul o fi învăţat şi româneşte…)

Apparently, Ubuntu has reached by far the notoriety threshold in Switzerland. The site of the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur presents a feature on intercepting the DECT phones the easy way, and what is the bad guy using on his ThinkPad? That’s right, Audacity… in Ubuntu!

Sort of (dependencies not always mentioned):

• Added libmms-0.4 to fix gnome-plugins-bad, and rebuilt the latter.
• Added gnome-commander-1.2.7 (newer versions won’t build).
• Added Dillo 2.1.1 (and FLTK2 en passant).
• Added aria2c 1.3.1.
• Added emesene-1.0.1.
• Added emelFM2 0.6.0.
• Added diffuse-0.3.4 (as an alternative to Meld).
• Added dosbox-0.73 (works great with the MS-DOS version of Pushover).
• Added GParted 0.3.9.
• Added PyRenamer 0.6.0.
• Added SoundConverter 1.3.2.
• Added AlsaPlayer 0.99.80 (+alsaplayer-fft, alsaplayer-mac).
• Added mac-3.99 (Monkey Audio, CLI).

KNOWN ISSUE WITH SCIENTIFIC LINUX 5.3: Because SL uses a modified gstreamer-plugins-extras (to make use of lame, taglib, libid3tag, libmad), it conflicts with gstreamer-plugins-ugly (it should conflict with RPMforge’s and RPM Fusion’s too!) because they both include libgstlame. This makes SoundConverter impossible to install, as it requires gstreamer-plugins-ugly.

Nu ştiu de ce unele recenzii americane consideră “And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks” o carte plicticoasă, chiar dacă unul din autori a considerat el însuşi că manuscrisul nu merită publicat.

Sigur, nu este o operă crucială, iar Burroughs nu prea se “vede” încă. Romănelul este cuminte — dar după standardele de astăzi, beatnicii zău că par prea cuminţi! —, fără a fi defel nereuşit. Eu unul l-am găsit fluid, bine scris — şi bine tradus de Ciprian Şiulea! —, o lectură plăcută pentru o minte obosită. (Bine, recunosc, îmi place literatura americană a anilor ‘30 … ‘50, fie ea oricât de conservatoare şi păşunistă. Căci acest volum nu dă peste bord de îndrăzneală, privit fiind el de unde suntem noi acum…)
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Tot pe Radio România Cultural, între 15:30 şi 15:40 se făcu vorbire de Turnul Eiffel, în emisiunea Lumea Ştiinţei. Ei bine, duduia de ne-a povestit cum stă cu chestia a avut în sistem un circuit basculant bistabil care a funcţionat după cum urmează:

• ori de câte ori era vorba de “Turnul Eiffel” ori de “la Tour Eiffel”, domnia-sa pronunţa efel;
• ori de câte ori era vorba de inginerul în speţă, domnia-sa pronunţa aifăl.

Bizară basculare. Şi de neînţeles. Pricep, cucoana s-a prins că franţujii pronunţă “la tur efel”, dar mai departe s-a gândit probabil că nea Gustave Eiffel era neamţ de felul lui.

Ce nu ştie madama este că numele lui german era Bönickhausen, şi că schimbarea de nume în Eiffel s-a produs tocmai ca numele să poată fi pronunţat de către francezi! Mai ţin să remarc faptul că prenumele este franţuzit şi el, căci este Gustave, nu Gustav!

Aşadar, pentru numele preasfântului, efel pe toată linia, ce organul calului! Nu poţi pronunţa prenumele în franceză şi numele de familie în germană!

I happen to have tried yesterday the KDE 4.2.4-based Sabayon 4.2 “KDE” LiveDVD, on my old PC which only has 512 MB of RAM and a crappy Radeon 9200SE. (sidux 2009-02 can’t cope with Radeon 9200SE, and neither can Mandriva 2009.1 “One”… bloody X.Org morons!)

I was impressed by the speed, responsiveness, and low memory footprint, and I don’t know if it has something to do with KDE, with the way Sabayon is built or with both of them.

Of course, Sabayon’s package management (Sulfur + Equo + Entropy) is absolutely unusable, unless you have a quad-core CPU. At least.

Also, the plasmoids are making me nuts, I can’t get used with the ugly and unpractical whatever-its-name-is area where you can take some actions. Not to mention the panel, counter-intuitive in customization, to say the least.

But again, maybe things will change for the best until KDE 4.6.0. So far, it’s good that KDE4 finally got a usable task manager, something KDE3 never had (not like this). In the meantime…

…I noticed that the official announcement page for KDE 4.3 is almost ready! It bears today’s date, and a text description, although there is no desktop screenshot as of yet.
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Radio România Cultural, astăzi, la 8:54:

În sezonul acesta se poartă genţi extraordinar de mari sau extraordinar de mici.

Extraordinar! Sper că Monica Columbeanu era pe recepţie.

From Foreign Policy, The China Bubble’s Coming — But Not the One You Think:

Financial commentators are obsessively debating whether the recent rise in the Chinese stock market means there’s a bubble — and if so, when it’s going to burst.

My take? Who cares! What happens to the broader Chinese economy is what we should really be watching. It will have a far-reaching impact on the rest of the world — much more far-reaching than a decline in stocks.

Despite everything, the Chinese economy has shown incredible resilience recently. Although its biggest customers — the United States and Europe — are struggling (to say the least) and its exports are down more than 20 percent, China is still spitting out economic growth numbers as if there weren’t a worry in the world. The most recent estimate put annual growth at nearly 8 percent.

Is the Chinese economy operating in a different economic reality?  Will it continue to grow, no matter what the global economy is doing?

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I am afraid coffee can not replace a good sleep (that’s why everybody wants to be a cat), but I have to deal with what I have…

• There is a guy telling you: Don’t buy Linux laptops (atl1c fail), «…and don’t buy Acer laptops!». Yeah, sure. Don’t buy Dell laptops. Don’t buy HP laptops. Don’t buy Toshiba laptops. Don’t buy ‘[[:alnum:]]+’ laptops. Because each and every vendor has at least one model that sucks. The key is to know what you’re buying, not to boycott an entire brand… otherwise you should boycott them all! My cheapo Acer TravelMate has a Broadcom for the wired Ethernet, and it works tremendously well. Should I win the lottery, I would rather buy a ThinkPad Lenovo though. I guess.
• Google is recursively recursive. Seen here.
• No, I cannot live without Adobe Flash, no matter how crappy it is. And no, Acrobat Reader is not bloatware (although the size of the download is huge): it’s the fastest PDF renderer (Xpdf excluded), and significantly faster than the bloody Evince. Open source is not necessarily better.
• Where the fuck has this guy found a package named QMMS in Ubuntu? The only link given is… apt:qmmp. But there is no qmms in Ubuntu, and Google can’t find anything either.
• Finally, I should recommend people Scientific Linux 5.3 for new installs instead of CentOS 5.3. The bloody CentOS team (normally, Karanbir Singh is to blame in this case) could not find the time to build Firefox 3.0.12 (a security update) from firefox-3.0.12-1.el5_3.src.rpm, posted by TUV on July 20, at 03:55. Compare this to Scientific Linux, who offers Firefox 3.0.12 since July 23, at 16:30. I might understand that KS is busy with CentOS 4.8, but FF is a single bloody package, and there are only 2 architectures, and we’re 8 days later, dammit! There is nothing fancy to test: if it’s (say) unstable, the responsibility is upstream, at Red Hat! The only problem I have with SL is their atrocious artwork, especially when comes to GDM…

Here’s a surprise: Wild crows can recognize individual people. They can pick a person out of a crowd, follow them, and remember them — apparently for years. But people — even people who love crows — usually can’t tell them apart. So what we have for you are two experiments that tell this story.

The rest, in The Crow Paradox.

…on how not to work, what else?
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Roxana Geambaşu is smart, but she lacks a Dr. Watson to tell her some elementary truths. His idea and the Vanish project are fabulous, yet the ecstatic reviews are somehow too exaggerated. But let’s start with them:

• This Message will Self-Destruct: New Tool Makes Online Postings Disappear
• Mission possible: researchers make online text self-destruct
• New Technology to Make Digital Data Self-Destruct
• This article will self-destruct: A tool to make online personal data vanish
• O româncă revoluţionează Internetul cu Vanish, un sistem prin care datele online se autodistrug

OK, and now, let’s get serious. The idea was great, but imagine you’re from the NSA, from the CIA, or even some bad guy from Google.

Unless you’re really dumb, you wouldn’t try to decode the original and unique instance of a message, right? You would definitely work on a copy, right? So Vahish can’t possibly delete anything!

What Vanish will do is to refuse to decrypt the message, and to overwrite it with gibberish, that’s all. Buy you, the evil guy, you’ll still have the original encrypted message!
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Yes, she does. I couldn’t possibly assert that “CentOS (or Scientific Linux) is marvelous for the desktop” — and I have never stated such a thing. On the contrary, what I said is that RHEL5 is sort of another XP, which can be read in several keys.

It only happens that I am using it today (CentOS 5.3 on the Acer and Scientific Linux 5.3 with IceWM on the HP Omnibook). Not because CentOS is “really good”, not because it’s “better than other distros”, but merely because it’s “standard” (and Mrs Martin knows that very well) and because… everything else is worse in a way or another!
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De reflectat:

Pe vremea mea, evident mă refer la “preistorie”, cine vorbea de unul singur era considerat nebun, astăzi este absolut normal să vezi pe cineva calm şi pacific care începe să urle şi să gesticuleze din senin; pe lângă faptul că rişti un infarct din cauză că nu te aşteptai la aşa ceva, începi să te uiţi disperat în jurul tău ca să-ţi dai seama dacă vorbeşte cu tine sau cu câinele tău şi numai aruncând o privire mai atentă vezi două căşti ciudate, ca în serialul Star Trek, ieşindu-i din urechi.

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